Maternal, Newborn, and Adolescent Health

Kerry Schulze and colleagues at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the U.S., working with the JiVitA Project in Bangladesh, will study urine and blood samples from an established cohort of two-year old children in Bangladesh to assess whether non-nutritional factors such as aflatoxin exposure, chronic inflammation, and compromised gut integrity cause the deceleration of growth exhibited by many children in that country by 24 months of age.

Craig Harris of the University of Michigan in the U.S. will develop 3-dimensional embryo culture models to study how maternal diets and environmental factors affect embryonic growth when organ tissues are being developed. Understanding this process could inform ways to reduce disruptions to the fetal development process that might affect growth, disease susceptibility and behavior later in life.

Jessica Fanzo of Bioversity International in Italy and colleagues at Save the Children UK will analyze the nutritional value and local acceptability of wild and neglected foods in Kenya to help introduce these underutilized foods and significantly reduce the costs of a nutritious diet for mothers and children in the region.

Qiang Chen of Arizona State University in the U.S. proposes to engineer edible plants, such as lettuce and rice, to express beneficial proteins found in human milk. The protein bodies in these plants allow for the stable, high accumulation of these human milk proteins, and the plants can either be eaten directly by infants or formulated into baby food to provide essential nutrients and antibacterial benefits.

Robin Bernstein of George Washington University in the U.S. will investigate how bioactive components in breastmilk affect the maturation of gut defense systems in infants in an effort to better understand potential preventative and therapeutic strategies to eliminate intestinal disease and promote infant development.

James Berkley of Oxford University in the United Kingdom and Kelsey Jones of Imperial College, working at the KEMRI/Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya will test whether enhancing therapeutic meals for malnourished children with essential fatty acids derived from the local Nile Perch fish could improve their immune defense systems and reduce severe infections that lead to mortality. If successful, these meals could enhance immune response instead of simply producing growth in malnourished children.

James Petrie of CSIRO in Australia will provide proof of concept that a readily available leafy green vegetable in Africa can be engineered to produce long-chain omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA. Such locally grown greens could be used in diets to improve infant cognitive development.

Mohammad Khaled at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the US will test whether eliminating H. pylori infection in pregnant women permits the replenishment of iron stores via iron and folate supplements. Eradicating this common bacteria in expectant mothers might thus facilitate treatment of maternal anemia and reduce delivery of underweight babies.

Shirley Luckhart and colleagues at the University of California Davis in the U.S. will develop and test in a mouse model a simple, safe, and cost-effective immune- enhancing nutritional supplement that could reverse and prevent intestinal damage thought to be cause by malarial infection. This intervention could improve immunity to bacterial infections that co-occur in children also suffering from malaria.

Thomas Jue, Frederic A. Troy and Youngran Chung at the University of California Davis in the U.S. will use a mouse model to track the biodistribution of sialic acid - abundant in human breast milk and shown in animal studies to improve cognition - as a first step in understanding the long-term cognitive advantages of breastfeeding and potentially developing a sialic acid supplement for infants to promote cognitive development.